Last week, I was visiting HAM PCP Tester Doug Rogers. While there, I saw something unusual yes beautiful. It was a “sidewheel” for the Sightron scope attached to his Air Arms HFT500, yet it wasn’t circular. This was my first view of a Nautilus Sidewheel.

Intrigued and interested, I asked Doug about this strange sidewheel. “Oh,” he said. “It’s great, I bought it from Hector”.

Hector is, of course, Hector Medina, the well-known, expert Field Target shooter. IN addition to competing, Hector also has his own business – Connecticut Custom Airguns. Here, he specializes in custom tuning to order and also designs and sells a small number of specialist parts – including the Nautilus Sidewheel.

So, I talked to Hector and here’s what he told me about the Nautilus. Like many great ideas, it evolved to fix a problem…

“One of the problems we find when we travel and shoot with our sidewheel scopes is the difficulty in packing a scope with a large sidewheel.” Explained Hector.

“And yet, a large sidewheel is not really needed for ranges from 10 to about 35 yards. It is only above 35 yards that the marks in the tape of 3-inch, and 4-inch sidewheels become too close to call accurately and with any consistency.”

“Some shooters use 6-inch and even larger sidewheels.” Continued Hector.” But we have found that large wheels are somewhat fragile and become a weak link in the scope section of the system.”

So how could the problem of accurate focusing at longer ranges be combined with compactness? Enter the Nautilus!

The Nautilus is a mollusk that is a direct descendant of the mollusks that lived on earth’s primitive seas about 500 million years ago.

The growth pattern of the Nautilus follows a logarithmic pattern. And it so happens that the lenses of a telescope, when moved with uniformly spaced threads, follow a pattern that closely resembles ta logarithmic curve.

So, says Hector, this curve seemed to be ideal for making a sidewheel!

The Nautilus sidewheel has a 3-inch diameter at the short ranges section, and a 8-inch diameter at the long end of the ranges. It’s easy to pack in a soft case for transport from lane to lane and it’s easy to pack into a hard case for long travels. Being light it poses little threat to the delicate mechanism of the sidewheel shaft.

The Nautilus Sidewheel is now available for the following scopes:
AEON, Sightron SIII, Sidewinder 30 , SWFA sidefocus, Nikko Stirling NightEater, Diamond, and Falcon T-50.